Gardiner also tries to include Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik strategy in the charge sheet.

Willy Brandt later went on to become Chancellor of Germany from 1969-1974, and was the architect of the highly controversial “Ostpolitik” policy of engagement with the Soviet Union and the East Bloc countries, perhaps an early forerunner of the Obama administration’s “reset” policy towards Moscow. Brandt was eventually forced to resign his office in April 1974 after one of his top advisers, Gunter Guillaume, confessed to being an agent for East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi.

On Ostpolitik first – something Gardiner tries to translate into an appeasement of dictatorships – this was nothing more than common sense. The policy, after all, was aimed primarily at other (East) Germans. Without Ostpolitik, there might have been no end to the Berlin Wall.

And all practical politicians – including Gardiner’s former employer Mrs T – have done business with dictators.

Perhaps Nile has forgotten Augusto Pinochet. And all those Middle Eastern regimes that both the UK and USA were more than happy to do business with.

And the likes of the deeply unpleasant Chiang Kai-shek, cultivated for so long after World War 2, and the singularly corrupt Governments in South Vietnam in whose defence so many US service personnel gave their lives.

Nile Gardiner is a fine example of how much foolishness one can express, without apology, while maintaining one’s place as a respected commentator. To wit…

…the appeasement of the brutal Iraqi dictatorship by France, Germany and other members of the UN Security Council will go down in history as one of the most shameful episodes of the early 21st Century.

He could have done better than Brandt surely! I’d have gone with the newspaper Mussolini used to edit when he was Socialist (SEE, JONAH GOLDBERG WAS RIGHT!!!), or else the current paper of the Portuguese Communist Party.

On Ostpolitik first – something Gardiner tries to translate into an appeasement of dictatorships – this was nothing more than common sense. The policy, after all, was aimed primarily at other (East) Germans. Without Ostpolitik, there might have been no end to the Berlin Wall.

You can call appeasement common sense, but it does not cease to be appeasement. Ostpolitik was either childishly naive or it was Finlandisation.

You can also say that without Ostpolitik there would have been no end to the Berlin Wall. And indeed that was Brandt’s aim. But as it turned out it was not his method. He wanted to bring down the Wall and keep the East Germans trapped on the other side with the Soviet Union still in place.

And all practical politicians – including Gardiner’s former employer Mrs T – have done business with dictators.

Dictators != totalitarian parties with a genocidal history.

Perhaps Nile has forgotten Augusto Pinochet. And all those Middle Eastern regimes that both the UK and USA were more than happy to do business with.

Pinochet being better than the Soviet-ally that was the alternative.

And the likes of the deeply unpleasant Chiang Kai-shek, cultivated for so long after World War 2, and the singularly corrupt Governments in South Vietnam in whose defence so many US service personnel gave their lives.

Corrupt they may have been, but totalitarian and genocidal they were not. It is a tragedy for the people of Vietnam that the Americans did not win that war. I would love to hear anyone make a case otherwise. It says a lot about this OP that it seems to think bribery is worse than re-education. America stopped their support for Chiang and only restarted when the CCP won. And again, whatever else you can say about Chiang, he was not Mao. Which is why Taiwan is an infinitely better place to live than the Mainland. And Chiang did not have to starve 30 million people to death to achieve it either.